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The Role of Religion in a Writer's Life

Yann Martel was born in Spain. He received a degree in
philosophy from Trent University in Ontario in 1981. After university
Martel worked in a variety of fields and traveled widely through India,
Iran, and Turkey. The publication of "Self," Martel’s first novel in
1996, led to him being shortlisted for the Chapters/Books in Canada First
Novel Award. Living in India inspired the book "Life of Pi," which was published in 2001 and went on to receive numerous awards,
including Canada’s Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction in 2001 and the
2002 Man Booker Prize. His most recent book "Beatrice and Virgil" was released in April 2010.

Transcript

Question: What role does religion play in your life?

Yann
Martel: Broadly speaking on religion, defining the word very
largely and what that means to me is I choose to believe that life makes
sense. That life is not just chemistry, not just chance. So faith
isn’t necessarily a belief in things, it’s just an openness to believing
something. So it’s entertaining the language of transcendentalism.

So
I choose to believe that life has transcendental meaning, rather than
mere chemical, mere horizontal meaning. I chose to have, to see life
vertically. And to me, it just makes it a richer experience. Is it
true? Is it factually true? Well, I don’t know, but no one who has any
kind of faith knows for certain. You fall in love with someone, you
have no idea what the future holds for you. You have a political faith,
you have no idea if your system will work out. When you have faith in
anything, it’s just a disposition to be open and to trust and to move
forward that way. And I find a view of life that entertains a
transcendental, that engages with the transcendental, makes things
wealthy. It also, it makes things wealthier in their significance, and
it also, it’s a way that makes suffering more bearable. That’s one of
the great limits of secularism. Secularism is incredibly powerful at
delivering things in the here and now. Good governance, science, human
rights, these are all results of the application of reason and their
secular triumphs. But secularism has nothing to say in the face of
death and in suffering.

So reason, for example, is a great blood
sport in a public arena. You know, atheists make for great spectacles.
Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins. In their public performances,
it’s amazing to hear them, but once you leave that spectacle, in the
privacy of the night, when we all walk away, all on our own, progressive
getting older, you know, subject to disease and to suffering, suddenly
reason is just a tool that doesn’t help you. If you believe it somehow
in a way you don’t fully understand, that doesn’t make logical sense,
somehow things make sense, then suffering is a small part of the canvas
of a bigger picture that you don’t see. And in that bigger picture,
somehow the suffering of children is a part of the puzzle and you just
accept that. And it may, so it doesn’t diminish the suffering, but it
does put it in a context. So, if only for that reason, you know, an
openness to it.

Now, I say that I’m religious, I’m extremely
critical of organized religion. You know, what’s happening... what has
been happening recently to the Roman Catholic Church, I’m one of the
ones who are delighted at all these revelations of sexual abuse. It’s an
outrage that the Church would value its reputation more than the
sanctity of its charges, of these children. And I think, ultimately
it’s better for the Church to be brought down several, several, several
pegs. So I’m as critical about organized religion, you know, the Roman
Catholic Church, of its homophobia, of its patriarchy, of its sexism, of
its history of anti-Semitism, I am totally okay with these attacks.
But there’s also something more afoot there than just that. And the
same thing with other religion, whether it’s Judaism, Buddhism,
Hinduism, they’ve all had their excesses, but nonetheless, there’s
something afoot in that kind of thinking, that I think augments a life.

Question:
How did you come to religion?

Yann Martel: No, my
background is totally secular, I’m from Quebec, which is the most
secular province in Canada, was the most Catholic, then underwent
something called the Quiet Revolution, which was in a matter of a year
or two, people left the church in droves. And as I said, it jumped from
the most religious province to the most secular. My parents are
children of that revolution, so I grew up in a completely secular
household and I studied philosophy at university, which is a great way
of making you an atheist, a rabid atheist, or at the very least, a rabid
agnostic.

What brought me to religion was, well, writing "Life
of Pi," and what brought me to writing "Life of Pi" was a trip to
India. India is this continent civilization, where for better or for
worse, religion is still a, is part of the mainstream of life. You see
temples, mosques, churches, everywhere. These famous, massive
pilgrimages in which, you know, millions of Hindus join into it. It’s a
dazzling site and it makes, it makes India a place that’s both a very
real place and a completely imaginary place. India is one of these
places where, I said, there is a concrete reality, you know, that you
can experience empirically, and overlaid on it is this extraordinary,
imaginary country... this fictitious, this mythological country. In
most Western countries, that mythological layer has been completely
stripped away, which is why, I think, India has been generous, not only
to religions, open to it, there’s more religions, I think, per square
inch, in India than anywhere else, for better and for worse, I’m
saying. But it’s also, it’s been a place that’s extraordinary generous
for storytelling. All kinds of stories are still possible in India.
Which I think for the last why for the last 20, 30 years, so much great
fiction has come out of India. And once again, for better and for
worse. You know, Bollywood is the largest cinema industry in the
world. Now, I think of the 5,000 movies made a year in Bollywood, you
know, 4,999 occupy the last bottom rungs of the worst movies ever made,
but nonetheless, stories, that place churns out stories like you can’t
believe.

So from someone who comes from a Western background,
where we are so taught to be reasonable, we are so pushed to be
reasonable, do things for, you know, rational reasons... it’s
desiccating, it dries you out, which is why I think so many people go to
India and in a sense go wonderfully crazy. They suddenly want to
become Buddhists, they want to become Hindus, they start wearing, you
know, orange robes and, you know, praying to elephant-headed gods and
they do yoga and they, you know, do funny things. Well, it’s because
you’ve been dried out and suddenly you’re drenched in water, it
refreshes you.

And so it was India that brought me to that, I saw
a face of religion, a side to it that I’d never seen before, and
decided to sort of investigate, "Well, what would it mean to have to
have faith? That crazy, crazy phenomenon where you are obdurately not
reasonable, what would that do?" So I posited this character who had
lots of faith, Pi, Pi Patel, who practices three religions. And from
being just a conceit, an artistic conceit, I fell in love with my
subject matter and I started being like him and thinking, "Well, why not
entertain Brahma and Allah and Jesus and Buddha and the gods of Jainism
and, you know, and why not sprites and all these other things? Why
not? Why not? What’s to be gained?"

I remember for years, I
volunteered in palliative care, care for the dying. And I remember
thinking, if you are dying in your bed, you know, if your legs are like
two little sticks and you have a mountain of a stomach and you’re rotted
by disease, you know, you’re, the flesh on your face is melted away and
you’ve lost your hair, what’s the point of being reasonable? Why not
believe in whatever? You know, whatever? Jesus, Buddha, any one of
these? Why not believe that someone transcendentally loves you? Why
not believe that? And so why not live that way? To entertain that
notion that the operating principal of the universe is love? Why not
believe that? In the meantime, still be reasonable, you know, still use
reason to improve your life, but once reason fails you, why not believe
in this great plan, you know, this great cosmic plan where ultimate
realization is this massive act of love. Why not?Recorded April 13, 2010